By now you’ve probably gotten the point that Ken Bruen’s The Killing of the Tinkers is not going to appeal to every reader. It is a God-awful nasty book. And I simply could not put it down.

Like Bruen’s first novel, The Guards, this novel focuses on Jack Taylor, a middle-aged alcoholic and cocaine addict who once was a policeman and now intermittently makes a living as a private investigator. In this instance, he’s been hired to find out who has been killing young male tinkers and mutilating the corpses. The tinkers are also known as Irish gypsies, the travelers, and the clans. So Taylor is very much operating in his element, on the underside of Irish society.

The killings that Taylor investigates are ghoulish and mysterious, but they are not really front and center in the story. Bruen is much more interested in what goes on inside of Taylor’s head and in his relationships with other characters than in how he detects. Taylor seems largely self-educated and is very knowledgeable about serious and popular literature, films, television shows, and popular music. In this novel, there are more references to writers and their works, to actors, to the storylines and specific scenes of films, to musical performers and performances, to specific song lyrics, and to celebrity gossip items than I could list in a space four or five times the length of this review. For the most part, these allusions are interesting in themselves, and if they do not all equally enrich the narrative, very few can be said to completely distract one's attention from the story.

Bruen’s prose is rapid-fire, something like a very spare version of James Elloy’s style. Whereas Ellroy crowds the page with chatter to suggest the milieu in which his characters are operating, Bruen leaves a lot of white space around the booze- and coke-scorched chatter that is Jack Taylor’s working mind. Bruen dedicates The Killing of the Tinkers>B? to Ed McBain, and there are some very amusing references to McBain and his books throughout the novel. But Bruen owes a clearer debt to Jim Thompson and Hunter Thompson. A reviewer of The Guards suggested that it defines a new category that might be called “Hibernian noir.” I think the word “gonzo” needs to be inserted into the phrase.

The characters around Taylor — and for an almost pathologically emotionally isolated character, he is, paradoxically, almost always surrounded by people - include longtime friends, acquaintances, barmen and other barroom regulars, former and current lovers, and assorted policeman and thugs. All are sketched convincingly, but the most memorable are Bryson, the villain; Sweeper, the head of a Tinker clan who has hired Taylor; and Keegan, a London cop who has bullied his way to the verge of a dismissal from the force and has taken an “Irish holiday” to help Taylor with his “case.” Keegan, in particular, is such an over-the-top character that he might have come across as a caricature - if self-caricature, intentional and not, were not such a prominent element of his personality.

But the interesting element of this novel may be the talk. Bruen’s rendering of Irish speech shows how the pervasiveness of American media has leeched Americanisms into Irish diction and idioms, and especially the slang, creating a dialect that is still distinctly Irish — just not the quaint kind of Irish that John Ford tried to fix in our cultural memories in The Quiet Man. Several years ago, Jesse Sheidlower compiled a book called The F Word in which he catalogued, in a very wry way, the myriad usages of the word, with just about every imaginable gradation of obscene emphasis attached. Bruen provides further illustrations of dozens of those usages and adds a few that are distinctly Irish. Still, there are passages that are quotable in any company. For instance, when Taylor visits a friend’s grave, he thinks, “To my eternal shame, he was dead for two years before I heard. God might forgive me, it’s the business He’s in. I won’t.”

Since I began this review with an analogy, I’ll end with one. Sometimes horrors are much more brutal because they are ordinary rather than extraordinary. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have watched the film The Deerhunter. Although I can brace myself for the scenes involving Russian roulette, I just can’t bear to look when Stevie falls from the helicopter and hits the rock in the river, fracturing both of his legs. The bone sticking through the skin is just too awful. In much the same way, there are a number of things in The Killing of the Tinkers that truly made me flinch, but there are a few things in Bruen’s novel that made me close my eyes for a long moment before I could begin reading again. But I did keep reading - almost compulsively.

--Martin Kich